Debranding Digital Identity: Personal Branding and Identity Work in a Networked Age

The Personal Branding Phenomenon

Brooks and Anumudu (2015) consider personal branding “the deployment of individual’s identity narratives for career and employment purposes” (p. 24). Vallas and Cummins (2015) similarly argue that the discourse of personal branding “invites employees to reconceive themselves as capitalist firms in their own right, establishing their own personal “brand” as a means of creating and managing demand for their own services” (p. 295). Schawbel (2007), a self-proclaimed millennial career and workplace expert, links the concept to a person’s online reputation and explains that it allows entrepreneurs to present “themselves as brands that communicate different values, personalities, and images to their audiences” (p. 62). It is important to note that in all of these definitions, personal branding is portrayed as a means of establishing a professional identity specifically designed to improve one’s employment prospects. Personal branding is thus understood as a response to a volatile labor market, high unemployment rates, and increased job competition (Brooks & Anumudu, 2015). In other words, the era of the personal brand is seen as having been ushered in by a series of detrimental external economic forces.